But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum th...eory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried ...down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Full fathom five thy father lies,Of his bones are coral made;...Those are pearls that were his eyes;Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:Ding-dong.Hark! Now I hear them--ding-dong bell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips' red;...If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damasked, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks,And in some perfumes there is more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound;I grant I never saw a goddess go:My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.And yet by heaven I think my love as rareAs any she belied with false compare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I try to make a rough music, a dance of the mind, a calculus of the emotions, a driving beat of praise out of the pain and mystery... that surround me and become me. My poems are meant to make your mind get up and shout.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is so rare to meet with a man outdoors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his han...ds. Behind every man's busy-ness there should be a level of undisturbed serenity and industry, as within the reef encircling a coral isle there is always an expanse of still water, where the depositions are going on which will finally raise it above the surface.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a dee...p cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale.... When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the lacinated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinit...esimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »